Inference is Turing Post’s way of asking the big questions about AI — and refusing easy answers. Each episode starts with a simple prompt: “When will we…?” – and follows it wherever it leads.
Host Ksenia Se sits down with the people shaping the future firsthand: researchers, founders, engineers, and entrepreneurs. The conversations are candid, sharp, and sometimes surprising – less about polished visions, more about the real work happening behind the scenes.
It’s called Inference for a reason: opinions are great, but we want to connect the dots – between research breakthroughs, business moves, technical hurdles, and shifting ambitions.
If you’re tired of vague futurism and ready for real conversations about what’s coming (and what’s not), this is your feed. Join us – and draw your own inference.
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Inference is Turing Post’s way of asking the big questions about AI — and refusing easy answers. Each episode starts with a simple prompt: “When will we…?” – and follows it wherever it leads.
Host Ksenia Se sits down with the people shaping the future firsthand: researchers, founders, engineers, and entrepreneurs. The conversations are candid, sharp, and sometimes surprising – less about polished visions, more about the real work happening behind the scenes.
It’s called Inference for a reason: opinions are great, but we want to connect the dots – between research breakthroughs, business moves, technical hurdles, and shifting ambitions.
If you’re tired of vague futurism and ready for real conversations about what’s coming (and what’s not), this is your feed. Join us – and draw your own inference.
Beyond the Hype: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About RAG. Amr Awadallah, founder & CEO of Vectara
Inference by Turing Post
23 minutes
2 months ago
Beyond the Hype: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About RAG. Amr Awadallah, founder & CEO of Vectara
In this episode of Inference, I sit down with Amr Awadallah – founder & CEO of Vectara, founder of Cloudera, ex-Google Cloud, and the original builder of Yahoo’s data platform – to unpack what’s actually happening with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in 2025.
We get into why RAG is far from dead, how context windows mislead more than they help, and what it really takes to separate reasoning from memory. Amr breaks down the case for retrieval with access control, the rise of hallucination detection models, and why DIY RAG stacks fall apart in production.
We also talk about the roots of RAG, Amr’s take on AGI timelines and what science fiction taught him about the future.
If you care about truth in AI, or you're building with (or around) LLMs, this one will reshape how you think about trustworthy systems.
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Guest:
Amr Awadallah, Founder and CEO at Vectara
https://www.linkedin.com/in/awadallah/
https://x.com/awadallah
https://www.vectara.com/
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Chapters
00:00 – Intro
00:44 – Why RAG isn’t dead (despite big context windows)
01:59 – Memory vs reasoning: the case for retrieval
02:45 – Retrieval + access control = trusted AI
06:51 – Why DIY RAG stacks fail in production
09:46 – Hallucination detection and guardian agents
13:14 – Open-source strategy behind Vectara
16:08 – Who really invented RAG?
17:30 – Can hallucinations ever go away?
20:27 – What AGI means to Amr
22:09 – Books that shaped his thinking
Turing Post is a newsletter about AI's past, present, and future. Publisher Ksenia Se explores how intelligent systems are built – and how they’re changing how we think, work, and live.
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Things mentioned during the interview:
Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM) Leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/vectara/leaderboard
HHEM 2.1: A Better Hallucination Detection Model and a New Leaderboard
https://www.vectara.com/blog/hhem-2-1-a-better-hallucination-detection-model
HCMBench: an evaluation toolkit for hallucination correction models
https://www.vectara.com/blog/hcmbench-an-evaluation-toolkit-for-hallucination-correction-models
Books:
Foundation series by Isaac Asimov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(novel_series)
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Hardcover by Yuval Noah Harari https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095
Setting the Record Straight on who invented RAG
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/setting-record-straight-who-invented-rag-amr-awadallah-8cwvc/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksenia-se
https://huggingface.co/Kseniase
Inference by Turing Post
Inference is Turing Post’s way of asking the big questions about AI — and refusing easy answers. Each episode starts with a simple prompt: “When will we…?” – and follows it wherever it leads.
Host Ksenia Se sits down with the people shaping the future firsthand: researchers, founders, engineers, and entrepreneurs. The conversations are candid, sharp, and sometimes surprising – less about polished visions, more about the real work happening behind the scenes.
It’s called Inference for a reason: opinions are great, but we want to connect the dots – between research breakthroughs, business moves, technical hurdles, and shifting ambitions.
If you’re tired of vague futurism and ready for real conversations about what’s coming (and what’s not), this is your feed. Join us – and draw your own inference.
